Category Errors

[elfs]

So, the irresponsible Terry Eagleton has taken out his droll pen to criticize Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. Botton's essay, if there's anything to be said for it, is a rather entertaining and pointless book, but Eagleton makes a tragic category error early in his evicerations look less responsible than he promises with his chosen tone:

The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised.

Free speech and civil rights are categorically different from belief in the supernatural, so much so that it's hard to see how Eagleton leaps from one to the other with any responsibility. The first two are civil issues, the latter personal. Debates about whether people should have free speech (which are real, and ongoing; see SOPA, PIPA, and PCIPA) continue to this day, and one is not "patronized" when the question is engaged: passionate about either granting that right, or restricting it for ideological reasons, but hardly "patronized."